Ruthann Quitiquit

Ruthann Quitiquit’s office is filled with the kind of bric-a-brac that marks someone who’s worked somewhere a long time. Cultural artifacts, photos, little treasured jokes like the pageant-style "Miss Honeymoney" sash hanging in the corner. Everything has a story.

On Monday, the retiring Quitiquit will have it all cleared out — most of it, anyway — to make way for the new president and chief executive officer of Parents and Children Together, Ryan Kusumoto. On the whole, she is happy to be moving on, but in a farewell interview this week, she did tear up a bit.

"I grew up here," she said. "I came here when I was 33 years old. I’m going to be 67 in October."

She moved to Hawaii when her first husband got a job in Hilo, and subsequently got her master’s degrees in public health and social work at the University of Hawaii. She remarried and the couple is building retirement plans around sailing trips and visits with children and grandchildren.

At the moment, though, she’s still absorbed in the professional passion of working with families. The agency has been based for its 45 years at Kuhio Park Terrace, but it has delivered a range of social services to low-income families statewide. PACT may be known best for its work in Head Start, an established federal program Quitiquit defends. Research has not kept up with the current changes the program has made to be more standards-based, she said.

Further, there’s the pride in PACT’s newest outreach, a project of its Economic Development Center called The Makery. It provides computer-assisted equipment for manufacturing by clients’ cottage industries. And there’s the job-training program for inmates on work-furlough release.

There’s hope to be drawn from such programs — with a reality check.

"If I didn’t believe that people could change, I wouldn’t be here," she said. "Some of them are going to achieve and they’re going to get out, and they’re going to move on, and some of them are going to go right back to whatever got them in there in the first place. And the trouble is, you don’t know which ones, and you’ve got to treat all of them the same."

QUESTION: How did PACT start here?

ANSWER: It started as the Parent Child Center, which was the precursor to Early Head Start. It was a War on Poverty program here at KPT (Kuhio Park Terrace). … Then we got our Hana Like Home Visitor Program, and then we got Respite. … Back then it was called Parent and Child Center of Kalihi. Then it changed to Parent and Child Center of Hawaii. When we kept getting bigger, we changed the name to Parents and Children Together.

Q: What was the thinking behind that name?

A: We work a lot with families, and our basic mission and belief is we want to keep families together, whenever it’s safe for everybody to be together.

When we took over our Family Peace Center Program, the board really struggled with taking on a domestic violence program, because we were called Parents and Children Together. And a lot of domestic violence families should not stay together. And that program’s goal is to certainly change behaviors in batterers and make sure the victims are safe, but victims and children may only stay safe if we help that victim leave. …

Q: To some extent, then, you have to let go of family reunification?

A: Right, with some of the domestic violence, yeah.

Q: Has the mission ever changed over time?

A: When I came on, we had about $5 million as our budget. The more contracts you have, the more you can pay for the infrastructure you need to run an agency. …

When you get bigger, it helps you get your administrative money, basically, to support all the things you have to do besides delivering all the services to the family, or the child, or the batterer, whatever.

So within that process, the board really looked at how can we expand: How can we continue to look for new contracts and new lines of service while always keeping to the mission of the agency?

About two years ago, we were looking to bid on this contract where you did fingerprinting, because a number of our contracts say we have to do fingerprinting of our staff. They can’t have any criminal records, and all this stuff.

And so we spent a long time at, "What does this have to do with helping individuals, families, children and communities to be stronger and be better? We’re helping other agencies get their fingerprinting done?" So we decided not to go for it. … There are things we have turned down we thought we could do, but it didn’t really fit within the mission.

Q: But were there changes because social needs changed?

A: We changed our mission about when Family Peace Center, … their board came to our board and said would we basically take them under our wing. And that’s when the board really had to think about, did they want to work with batterers? And so we changed the mission.

The mission is really helping to look at strengths and weaknesses of families and individuals and communities, and help them be the best that they can be.

Q: PACT has always been at KPT?

A: It started here because this was where low-income families lived, and the agency has always been here. … When other agencies talk about "community-based," I’m going, "Honeybun, you don’t know what community-based is, until you come to work every day at KPT, and see the good and the bad." …

Q: How much has KPT changed?

A: The population has really changed. … I worked for PACT back in 1982, but I ran a military program up at Tripler. I came here to KPT in 1988. At that time the largest ethnic population here was Samoans, probably about 75, 80 percent.

There are still a lot of Samoans here, and there were always mixed Hawaiian, but a lot of the Pacific Islanders are coming in. It’s gotten to be a clash again of cultures. Because most of the Samoans who have been in Hawaii have been here for many years, many generations, they’ve been acculturated. …

The Micronesians are really struggling. … They may have shopped in a grocery store where you bought frozen fish and tuna, and they never watched their kids because they didn’t have to, you know? Because family members or people in the community did.

I’ll see a kid walking down the road, and I know there’s a parent somewhere, a block behind, because they’re talking to their friends and kind of walking, but they don’t get concerned about their kid because they never had to before. I’ve pulled kids out of the road because somebody’s coming down the road, or they’re walking behind cars and somebody’s backing up …

Nice people, caring people, love their kids. Just a different …

Q: Awareness of danger?

A: Yeah.

Q: Have you changed your programs to adjust?

A: We always had people on staff who spoke Samoan because we had such a large Samoan population. Now more and more families are Chuukese, Marshallese, Pohnpeian. So we are trying to find staff, or hiring parents as parent aides, and getting them their child development associate degree, so they can now become teachers, so we can get more people in the classrooms who can speak the language of the people that are coming in.

It’s more and more of a struggle to find people who have the education, or the drive, or want to help us learn new languages and cultures, and stuff like that.

Q: Are you seeing a harder adjustment for the Micronesians?

A: I think it’s harder in the fact that … a lot of the Samoans here are from American Samoa, so they spoke English — not everybody, but they spoke English. They had a concept of going to school, and that kind of thing.

This population does not come from that value system, so it’s harder to get them motivated to bring in their kids for Head Start and to call if they’re not, and that kind of thing.

But also, they have a lot of health issues because of all the (atomic weapons) testing, and all that stuff …

Q: How has PACT recovered from all the budget cuts right after the recession?

A: Some of the contracts that got cut, I don’t think they’ll ever come back.

Q: For example?

A: Well, they cut all of the Healthy Start funding across the state, and we were one of the largest providers. So like, within a two-month period, I lost $4 million worth of funding.

Q: Again, Healthy Start is a program where you go into the home visiting with new babies?

A: Right. It’s a child abuse- and neglect-prevention program. The state now, through (federal program) and Obamacare money, they just funded a number of home visiting programs. Our beginning area was always Kalihi. We had expanded to Windward and all these different places, but they brought back the funding for the Kalihi-Honolulu area. …

What we did is we always looked for something else. We expanded. … If we couldn’t do this anymore, could we take some of that expertise and do this?

Q: So you just have to be agile, then?

A: You just gotta keep looking.

Q: Wow. You never get to relax, then?

A: And that’s one of the reasons — I love what I do. I truly do. I just get so tired about worrying about money.

Q: When is retirement day for you?

A: Aug. 4. The new guy comes on. … I’ll probably stay on for a month or two for training and transition and stuff like that.

Q: You mentioned that a lot of your staff, as well as you, have worked here a long time. Why do they stay?

A: I think they like the job. We truly are a nice agency. You know, we’re not perfect, nobody’s perfect. We have our staffing problems, we have our client problems, all that.

We were so small, everybody knew everybody. Plus, our agency is built on the Head Start tenets, which are, the community and the parents dictate what that program’s going to look like. … So the agency has always been built on empowering families, letting them have a say in the services, really being part of the community. And really working with the parents as equal partners.